In a nut shell, my mother got a system from a friend of ours. (Used.) It's a 2.3ghz P4, 512mb of RAM, Radeon 7000 and it WAS running XP Home. What happened was the PC used to have 2 HDD, before giving us the pc our friend moved all the info he needed to the slave and than popped it out. When I went to boot into the system, it told me the partition table was messed, upon fixing that and getting into the system..... BSOD. I figured screw it, I was gonna wipe everything clean anyway. So I go ahead and install a fresh copy if Windows (Media Center). Partial success. The system boots up fine and once I get into the OS everything runs like silk. My problem is this, Prior to loading up the OS the system CRAWLS. It stalls at the P4 screen asking me if I want to go into the BIOS for a while. Than it goes to what basically shows up as an empty DOS prompt....idles there for a while and than goes to load up the OS....the OS loads alright but up to that point its at least a 1-2 min wait. I poked around in the BIOS but to no avail. The weird thing is that the system was stalling like this the first time I boot it up, yet it was running fine yesterday, no lagging no nothing. Unfortunately my friend had no idea where the CD with the drivers was and Windows partially seems to pick up the info. For the world of my I cant find a mobo model number. Anything that I CAN find I'm digging up drivers for. But in short, im stumped. Anyone got a solution?
You might want to check the jumpers on your hard drives and dvdroms. When I had an intermittent problem like that with windows would sometimes load slowly, I had 2 drives on the same cable as masters. Sometimes moving your IDE cables to different slots can fix it.
